README

mowyw - mowyw writes your websites (or: Moritz writes your websites ;-)
For license of this file see the notice at the end of the file
mowyw is an offline CMS, that means it process sources files and generates
output files from them, usually HTML files, but php files and others are
possible as well (with some limitations though).
For a formal and more complete description see the manpage at
<http://perlgeek.de/software/mowyw.1>
SHORT HOWTO:
-----------
choose an empty directory, and there create the three directories
includes/
source/
online/
The `source/' directory contains the source files that will be processed by
mowyw. Each file in the `source/' directory is mapped to one file in the
`online/' directory. You should not write files into the `online/' directory
since they may be deleted or overwritten, and you should not modify existing
files in that directory since all changes are lost during the next run.
All files that might be included by others (including menus) should be in the
`includes' directory.
Now place a file index.html (or whatever you want it to be called) in the
'source/' directory.
If all your HTML files have a common header/footer, you may want to place them
in in the files `includes/header' and `includes/footer'.
For example `inlcudes/header' may contain
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" href="style.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="print.css" />
and `includes/footer' may contain
</body>
</html>
and perhaps an additional footer line to be displayed in all pages.
Now write some content in the file `source/index.html' and then run mowyw.
You should get an output like that:
Processing File 'source/index.html'... DONE.
Now point your browser at source/index.html and see if it worked.
Files not ending in .html, .htm, .shtml, .xhtml etc. are not processed, just
copyied.
You can change the default pathes with the following command line options to
mowyw:
--postfix=html
--includes-prefix=incl/
--source-prefix=src/
--destination-prefix=out/
--menu-prefix=incl/menu/
Note that if you want the prefixes to be directories you have to include the
trailing slash (or whatever the directory separator on your OS is).
If you didn't change any heaer/footer/included files you can save processing
time by adding the command line option '--make', in which case mowyw will
compare the timestamps of the source file and designated output file and will
only process the source file if it is newer.
INCLUDES:
So far mowyw didn't do much work for you, it just added header and footer
sections to all html files.
But it can do more for you: includes.
Just use the line
[[[include foo]]]
or
[% include foo %]
in your files, and the line will be replaced with the content of the file
`includes/foo'. It works pretty much like #inlcude "includes/foo" with a C pre
processor or <!-- #include virtual="includes/foo"--> with Server Side Includes
(SSI).
Note that everywhere the [[[ ... ]]] delimiters can be exchanged by [% .. %].
If the file includes/global exisits, it is processed before each source file.
Its output is discarded, but options and variables defined in that file are
available in all source files.
MENUS:
Suppose you want to write a navigation menu in your html files that look like
this:
menu
|
+-- foo
|
+-- bar
|
+-- baz
and if you click on foo, a sub menu opens:
menu
|
+-- foo
| |
| +-foo1
| +-foo2
| +-foo3
|
+-- bar
|
+-- baz
The way you do this with mowyw is simple:
create a file called `includes/menu-navigation' and fill it with something
like this:
<div class="menu">
Navigation:
<ul>
[% item foo <li><a href="foo.html" {{class="#active"}}>foo</a>
{{<ul>
<li><a href="foo1">foo1</a></li>
<li><a href="foo2">foo2</a></li>
</ul>}}</li> %]
[% item bar <li><a href="bar.html" {{class="#active"}}>bar</a></li> %]
[% item baz <li><a href="baz.html" {{class="#active"}}>baz</a></li> %]
</ul>
</div>
now in your file foo.html, you use the line
[% menu navigation foo %].
This line will be replaced by mowyw with:
<div class="menu">
Navigation:
<ul>
<li><a href="foo.html" class="#active">foo</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="foo1">foo1</a></li>
<li><a href="foo2">foo2</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li><a href="bar.html" >bar</a></li>
<li><a href="baz.html" >baz</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
Each menu item looks like this: [% item label1 some_text %]. If it is called as
[% menu label1 %] it will produce some_text, and all double curly brackets {{ }}
are simply stripped, but the text between them remains.
If it is called with a different name, say [% menu label2 %] the curly brackets
and the text between them are stripped.
SYNTAX HILIGHTING
If you have both the Perl module Text::VimColor and Vim installed, you can use
the follwing construct to automagically generate syntax hilighted HTML markup:
<pre>[% syntax perl %]
#!/usr/bin/perl
sub blubb {
print "This sub only prints this stupid message\n";
}
[% endsyntax %]pre>
If you don't have Text::VimColor installed, the characters '&', '<' and '>'
will still be automatically escaped.
The only argument to 'syntax' is the language that the code is in, if you use
a value that vim doesn't know it will try to guess the language.
The standard CSS classes are:
.synComment { color: #0000FF }
.synConstant { color: #FF00FF }
.synIdentifier { color: #008B8B }
.synStatement { color: #A52A2A ; font-weight: bold }
.synPreProc { color: #A020F0 }
.synType { color: #2E8B57 ; font-weight: bold }
.synSpecial { color: #6A5ACD }
.synUnderlined { color: #000000 ; text-decoration: underline }
.synError { color: #FFFFFF ; background: #FF0000 none }
.synTodo { color: #0000FF ; background: #FFFF00 none }
(taken from Text::VimColor)
VERBATIM OUTPUT
If your website includes string like [% or %] etc., you can use the
verbatim-construct to prevent it from parsing:
[% verbatim foobarbaz %]
Things here inbetween will be printed out exactly as they stand here, you can
safely write things like
"in perl6 [...] returns array refs:
my $a = [2, [4, 5, [8, 9,10]]];"
note that the ']]]' will not cause any harm.
[% endverbatim foobarbaz %]
the name in the verbatim and in the endverbatim-package have to agree exactly
and my consist of alphabetic characters and numbers.
COMMENTS
You can exclude parts entirly from showing up in the output by putting them
inside a comment:
[% comment anything inside here will not show up in the output %]
In a comment everything but ']]]' is allowed.
OMITTING HEADER AND FOOTER
If you include a line like this:
[% option no-header %]
the header is _not_ prepended as usual.
You can achieve the following functionality for the footer with the line
[% option no-footer %]
SETTING AND READING VARIABLES
Suppose you want to add a different <title> to every page, but you want all
your HTML header to be in one specific place.
A way to achive this is with the setvar and readvar constructs. Place this in
your header file:
<html>
<head><title>[% readvar title %]</title>/head>
<body>
(of course you should use a doctype ;-)
And then in each source file you can use
[% setvar title This is the title of this stupid page %]
to set the title. If you forget to set a variable before using it a warning
will be emitted.
Scoping:
Variables are scoped in the sense that when you enter a new scope (by using
include, menu, item or automatically by including the header and footer) the
variables from the higher level scope are still available, but if you modify
them in local scope they will still be unmodified in the outer scope.
Example:
[% setvar foo bar %]
[% include somefile %]
[% redavar foo %] --- gives bar
In file somfile:
[% readvar foo %] --- gives bar
[% setvar foo baz %]
[% readvar foo %] --- gives baz
Therefore you can change the header's and footer's output by defining
variables in the main source file, but not the other way round.
SYNTAX CHANGE
-------------
Version 0.0.3 and before used only double square brackets
(like [[include foo]]), but I noticed that double closing square brackets
are part of a typical CDATA declaration in xml files (and xhtml) like this:
<style type="text/css">
/*<![CDATA[*/
CSS Declarations
/*]]>*/
</style>
Now tripple square brackets (like [[[ include foo]]] ) or, preferred,
[% ... %] are used.
LICENSE:
This README file is covered by the GPL (2 or later), however
the code examples in this file are public domain, e.g. you may use it
however you like.
The program mowyw is published under the GPL, for details see the
executable